Hubble captures rare image of a supernova as it happens

A huge star explodes in a huge amount of energy when it runs out of fuel These events can be so bright that they surpass entire galaxies, but they don't last for long. The Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture three different moments of a supernova in one image.

The author of the paper said that a supernova can be detected at a very early stage. It only lasts for a few days and can be easily missed. We can see a sequence of the images in the same exposure.

It was possible to see three different points in time because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The view of the object behind it can be changed if the intermediate object is too big. When the light of the intermediate object is bent, it can appear at a different point in space than the background object. The light from the supernova arrived at Hubble showing three different instances, because the light was bent along three different paths.

It is thought that the supernova happened 11 billion years ago, which is close to the beginning of the universe. Researchers were able to measure the star's size because of the different time points captured in the image. A red supergiant star is 500 times bigger than the sun.

The research is in a journal.

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